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Every scrumptious meal, has a list of ingredients that make it so. And your internal communications are no different. Are your employees missing important updates? Do they feel less engaged with the company? Is the organizational culture being diluted? If the answer to any or all of the above is yes, it is a sign of poor communication and low employee engagement. This indicates you may need to add some of these key missing ingredients to your internal communication plan for overcoming internal communication barriers. Bottom-Up Communication: Who was your favorite teacher at school? The one who never paused while lecturing or the one who asked for your opinion and answered your questions? It is no surprise that most prefer the latter. While the answer seems obvious, so many companies still make the mistake of only talking down to their employees through their communication tools. Yes, there is important information you need to relay to them, but no good relationship is ever one-sided. You need to create space to be able to hear from them too to avoid communication challenges. Are you running regular surveys to communicate effectively? Is there a safe and easy to use space via appropriate channels for employees to ask their questions? Can employees easily contribute to the content bank in the form of user-generated content using diverse communication channels? If not, then you are missing the crucial ingredient of two-way communication which is needed for effective internal communication and transparent communication. Targeted Communications: Do you and your friends see the same content when you open Instagram? Does your LinkedIn feed look exactly the same? Are you recommended the same books or household appliances? No. Because it is the era of personalization. And this holds true even for workplace communication. And still, several companies are sending out mass communication to their employees. The same content dispersed to all employees is likely to hinder effective communication and become an internal communication barrier. In fact, it is one of the most common internal communication barriers. Poor communication can lead to misunderstandings and targeted communication on the other hand, leads to better internal communication. Does your sales team need the same training material as your HR team? Does the announcement of a change in policy at the Mumbai office impact the London office? Does your internal communication platform facilitate effective communication, considering the diversity of your workforce? If every employee receives content about everything that is irrelevant for them, they will undoubtedly lose interest and miss information that is in fact relevant to them. This is why content on your internal communication platform needs to be targeted to employees based on where they are located, the department they work in and any other criteria unique to your organization to address language barriers and cultural differences. Consider creating content that respects and acknowledges cultural differences and promotes inclusivity in your internal communication, to be able to escape common communication barriers. Translation: Does everyone in India use English as their primary mode of communication in business? Yes. However, does every person in the country engage more with English content? Probably not. While you need to create content in English for your employees, it is very thoughtful to also create versions of this content in the language the employee prefers, addressing language barriers in communication. Alternatively, you may even provide the ability to your employees to translate the content they see on the internal communication platform into the language of their choice with just one click. Easy-to-use translation helps tackle multiple communication challenges. I may understand English, but chances are I will engage more with content in Hindi or Bengali if that’s the language I emote in. Engagement and Gamification: Content is the primary pillar of an internal communication building.However, it alone cannot hold the weight of the delicate structure. Another important pillar in overcoming communication barriers is employee engagement. You need to give your employees more than one reason to come back to your platform if you want to truly improve internal communication. We are used to the heart on Instagram. Even on a business platform like LinkedIn, we needed the laugh emoji. Your internal communication is no different. Employees want to be able to react to content. Speaking of LinkedIn, users receive badges for their contribution. Do your communication channels do the same? Top content creators want to be recognized for their contribution. Employees who read the most content want to be seen doing so. Promote features on your platform that enhance employee engagement, such as gamification and recognition. Bring in leaderboards and a wall of fame to recognize employees who actively contribute, to improve internal communication. Plug in the right reward system linked with employee motivation. For some it could be vouchers, for others planting trees is what could motivate them. Recognition and engagement must be personalized too. Tackling personalization is a key ingredient to tackle barriers to internal communication. Measurement: How do you even know your internal communication is not working? Yes, there is the feeling. And the pulse checks on whether employees are talking about the news at the water cooler. But these methods are archaic. For starters, with work from home, water cooler conversation is now digital and more difficult to gauge. It is thus non-negotiable to have sufficient statistics to measure your internal communication plan. And this has to go beyond how many employees opened your newsletter. You want to understand what kind of content they spent more time on that month, which campaign performed the best, what time of the day are your employees most active on the internal communication platform, which department is creating most engaging content and so on and so forth. And the point of these statistics is not only to measure the success of the program but more so to take informed decisions to address communication challenges. Addressing the most common internal barriers contributes significantly to organizational success. If you understand that the sales team is more interested in content about AI, you can now provide that. If the HR department is more active in the evenings, then you can schedule your announcements to match that timeline. Data is more than just food for thought today. It is key ammunition to overcome internal communication barriers. Mobile App: For a long time, employees could not access their work at home. There was a time of no laptops, a time of only-business laptops and then came the mobile phone. And gradually it became our office on wheels. For the good or bad, it is something that isn’t going away. Whether you work in an industry which has become completely remote or hybrid at best, or if you’re in a more traditional industry with staff working in factories – you need to be able to reach your employees when they are away from their desktops. Inability to even reach one’s employees is probably point zero when counting the barriers to communication. Not every frontline employee can even access their emails, mobile notifications thus become the only way to reach them in real-time. Thus, having your internal communication platform on mobile is essential to reach employees, especially those with rigid organizational structures or in frontline roles where mobile notifications are the primary means of communication. Security and Data: Even for the technology and security novice, it is clear that data security has become a big subject. Is there transparency in the communication process on your internal communication platform? Is your platform of choice GDPR compliant? You need to be sure that as a company you implement an internal communication platform which is secure in terms of its architecture and is a platform that has its base covered when it comes to data security. This is a feeling that must also transcend to employees. They want something easy to use, but at the same time they want to be able to trust the system they log into. Branding: Your employee needs to be treated with as much care as your external customer, if not more. We say we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but the publishing industry can tell you how much time they do in fact spend on that very cover because it’s what the reader sees first and what they very often buy. You spend hours on the creatives for social media but allow your internal communication platform to look mundane? It is important the branding of your platform represents the colours of your brand, is nice to look at and catches the attention of your employee. More so, the more they keep seeing the strong branding, the more they internalize the same. Your internal communication platform is the gateway to your branding efforts. Advocacy: The lines between internal and external communication are blurring. In the era of influencer marketing, your employees are your best brand advocates. Are you making it easy for them to embrace this role as your brand advocates? Does your internal communication platform give your employee the ability to share good news externally? Let’s say you announce to them an award the company has won, or the positions you are recruiting for, can they share this to their own network? Is it easy to do? Can it be measured? Can they be rewarded? In a time where reputation management is high priority for companies, your internal communication plan must be empowering your employees to support you with the endeavor. If you’re looking for an employee communication platform which ticks all the above boxes, you need not look any further. You’re one click away: Schedule your demo Want to see Sociabble in action? Our experts will answer your questions and guide you through a platform demo. Published on 31 January 2022 Last update on 19 June 2024 On the same topic eBooks Transitioning to Something Better: Sociabble as an Alternative to Workplace from Meta Client Success Stories ~ 6 min Interview with L’Occitane Group: An Internal Communication Case Study Client Success Stories ~ 9 min Renault Trucks France: A New Digital Communication System to Unite the Sales Network Webinars ~ 1 min How to structure the Digital Workplace?